Thief by Greg Curtis Read Free Book Online Page B

to, but because she couldn’t. Her vocal cords weren’t even close to human. Assuming she actually had vocal cords.
     
    On a hunch he tried some of the experimental cetacean speech analysis software he’d been donated by one of his research institutes. He didn’t support a lot of environmental concerns; he simply didn’t have the resources, but he’d always had a soft spot for whales. So when a bright young marine biologist had spoken publicly about his belief in their intelligence, and his dream of communication, he’d found himself an anonymous backer and in turn Mikel had gained access to some of his research.
     
    Thus far the programme hadn’t been very successful in communicating with the huge creatures, but it had managed to decode some basic emotions, and a few whale words. Things like ‘food’ and ‘liking’. Mikel had always suspected a lot of the problem was that whale song wasn’t a true symbolic language in the human sense, and hence wasn’t analysable in the same way as speech. But that didn’t stop him hoping. Nor had it stopped the scientists from trying.
     
    The programme didn’t have a lot more joy in decoding the angel’s tongue, but at least it detected most of the syllables she used, even if it couldn’t describe them as anything other than a mathematical model or a series of wave patterns. Her speech he finally accepted, wasn’t simply out of the vocal range of humans, it had sounds in it which couldn’t have been made by any known throat.
     
    Infra red analysis at least gave more useful data. Her body temperature read a completely normal 37 degrees Celsius. Or normal for humans that was.  He had no idea what was normal for an angel. He could see her wings there in the screen, the blood pulsing through their massive arteries in giant orange throbs, and returning as dark blue waves. While the size of the arteries involved was staggering, with some being even larger than a man’s aorta, he was still relieved to see them. Whatever else she was, she had a mammalian circulatory system at least. Therefore, whatever else she was, she was a living creature, a mammal.
     
    And therefore perhaps, she was vulnerable.
     
    A thought that had been dancing senselessly at the back of his mind finally hit him between the eyes. The previous day as he’d desperately made their escape, he’d assumed she was in danger from the bullets. Yet he knew no church doctrine would ever have accepted that, - she was an angel and was therefore above mere physical danger.
     
    If he’d thought about it at the time he might have been tempted to leave her to fend for herself. It would have been the smart thing to do. But he’d never thought about it. He’d known absolutely then, that she too was in danger, that she’d placed her physical life in his hands, and he’d reacted accordingly. Now, looking at her blood pulsing smoothly he realized he’d been right, she was vulnerable to the same dangers as him.
     
    It still didn’t explain why she hadn’t left when the shooting started, and returned later. Even without her angelic powers, the gift of flight should surely have put her safely beyond all reach in mere seconds. One question at a time he decided.
     
    Next he considered the biological impossibility of a women with wings.
     
    Breaking down her image as she flexed her wings he built a three-dimensional topographic map of her body, and studied the muscles as they rippled. It was a most impressive map. The angel was probably the most muscular woman he’d ever heard of, and that was based upon only the muscles he could see. Somewhere in her torso, probably around her kidneys, he realized she had to have enormous flight muscles. They probably connected to her buttocks much as the quadriceps did in a man. She also had to have massively developed pectorals. Two sets; one for the arms, and one for the wings. Her sternum surely had to be shaped like a bird’s bursa with raised crest for muscle